Billie holiday lady sings the blues book

Lady Sings the Blues by Billie Holiday

With photosOriginally released by Doubleday in 1956, Harlem Moon Classics celebrates the publication with the fiftieth-anniversary edition of Billie Holiday’s unforgettable and timeless memoir. Updated with an insightful introduction and a revised discography, both written by celebrated music writer David Ritz.Lady Sings the Blues is the fiercely honest, no-holds-barred autobiography of Billie Holiday, the legendary jazz, swing, and standards singing sensation. Taking the reader on a fast-moving journey from Holiday’s rough-and-tumble Baltimore childhood (where she ran errands at a whorehouse in exchange for the chance to listen to Louis Armstrong and Bessie Smith albums), to her emergence on Harlem’s club scene, to sold-out performances with the Count Basie Orchestra and with Artie Shaw and his band, this revelatory memoir is notable for its trenchant observations on the racism that darkened Billie’s life and the heroin addiction that ended it too soon. We are with her during the mesmerizing debut of “Strange Fruit”; with her as she rubs shoulders with the biggest movie stars and musicians of the day (Bob Hope, Lana Turner, Clark Gable, Benny Goodman, Lester Young, Coleman Hawkins, and more); and with her through the scrapes with Jim Crow, spats with Sarah Vaughan, ignominious jailings, and tragic decline. All of this is told in Holiday’s tart, streetwise style and hip patois that makes it read as if it were written yesterday.

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05.10.2019

Billie Holiday - Lady Sings The Blues (1957, live)

Lady Sings the Blues () is an autobiography by jazz singer Billie Holiday, which was co-authored by William Dufty. The book formed the basis of the
Billie Holiday

Billie Holiday: Lady Sings The Blues

Translating her voice is revealing. She doesn't talk much about men and I'm sure she was a handful. She was treated so badly by whites and cops and blacks for that matter. I am a big Billie Holiday fan, I have all of her music and once I start playing it, it so difficult to stop. When I received it in the mail, the cover seemed strangely familiar.

With all this acting experience behind me, Shelton thought I was ready for a crack at the movies. Not Hollywood, just Astoria, Long Island. He got me a part out there playing mob scenes in a picture with Paul Robeson. From that I got a real part in a short featuring Duke Ellington. It was a musical, with a little story to it, and it gave me a chance to sing a song -- a real weird and pretty blues number. That was the good thing about the part. The rough part, of course, was that I had to play a chippie.

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The life story of jazz singer Billie Holiday told in her own words. Holiday writes candidly of sexual abuse, confinement to institutions, heroin addiction, and the struggles of being African American before the rise of the Civil Rights Movement. According to an article in the San Francisco Chronicle , Dufty's aim was "to let Holiday tell her story her way. Fact checking wasn't his concern. If her music was autobiographically true, her autobiography is musically true. In his study of Holiday, Billie Holiday: The Musician and the Myth , John Szwed argues that Lady Sings the Blues , is a generally accurate account of Holiday's life, and that Holiday's co-writer, William Dufty, was forced to water down or suppress material by the threat of legal action. In reviewing the Penguin Modern Classics edition, the critic Craig Brown also noted that the work has several key omissions and inaccuracies, singling out the opening lines: "Mom and Pop were just a couple of kids when they got married.